8 posts tagged “episode comments”
My initial reactions went something like this:
(Minor spoilers and copious exclamation marks follow)
Yay Mickey! Yay Jackieeeee!
Yay Jack!
Yay Sarah Jane!
Yay Martha!
Yay Rose!
Yay Doctors!
YAY! DONNA!!! DOCTOR DONNA!!!
Yay "I can't tell you what I'm thinking right now!"
Yay Donna!
Yay Martha and Mickey joining Torchwood!
Yay Donna!
Yay Rose getting a (sort of) happy ending!
Yay Donna!
Nooooooooooo!!! DONNAAAAAAAAAA!!!
*fires up BBC iPlayer to watch again*
Oh, Torchwood writers, this is more like it!
Nice pacing, character development, a satisfying conclusion. A good balance of tone, from the humour of the supermarket scene to the tenderness of Owen/Diane to the tragedy of John Ellis's futureless life. Meanwhile, Rhys finally resurfaces and has some lovely scenes with Gwen.
Moments that actually brought me to the brink of tears! Ellis talking to his now elderly son, trying desperately to ignite some spark of recognition in his eroded mind. Jack finding, briefly, some sort of a kindred spirit and holding his hand as he killed himself.
Nitpicks are few. Namely, once again Toshiko is all but absent - at least Ianto got to take the time travellers shopping and be deadpan about it. And, if Diane was going to name check a pioneering female aviator who died in mysterious circumstances it should really have been Amy Johnson rather than Amelia Earhart. But these are small things indeed.
This was the best episode in the series so far, and I am chuffed that Catherine Tregenna has also penned the penultimate episode "Captain Jack Harkness" when we'll finally get some backstory for Jack. Consider my faith restored.
I enjoyed the "Love & Monsters" episode in the most recent series of Doctor Who, and I don't really have any problem with this sort of outsider-perspective storyline. However, L&M also had all that lovely meta commentary about the nature of fandom going for it.
I think "Invisible Eugene" is perhaps a slightly smoother episode than last week's. Nobody does anything unfathomable and I like the fact that we see Gwen actually carrying out an investigation - her role within Torchwood, other than being "the heart", still feels undefined so I enjoy it when she gets specific things to do.
I do think the episode would have been far subtler without the narration from Eugene and the rather heavy-handed sermon on the nature of life, though. That was really where it fell down for me.
That said, it's closer to the kinds of stories I was expecting from this series. And finally a bit of alien tech that doesn't need to be destroyed for our own good! There's a better balance of the good and bad effects of the artefact. Yes, the eye leads to Eugene's death, but that was as a result of people's reactions to it. Ultimately it does what it was made to do - it gives him perspective - and that turns out to be an entirely good thing.
Two more episodes that follow the Torchwood standard of starting well and then collapsing in on themselves in the final act. Which is not to say I hated them. There's some good stuff here - that's what makes it so irritating - if it was all bad I could leave it alone, but I'm still intrigued enough to keep picking at it.
"Greeks Bearing Gifts" gets automatic points simply for having a tiny Japanese woman secretly fight crime, I mean, there just is no downside to this scenario. Mary, well-played by Daniela Denby-Ashe, also made for a compelling character, and her fledgling romance with Toshiko was enjoyable.
Likewise, "They Keep Killing Suzie" had a really interesting premise in returning to the events of the first episode and exploring Suzie's character.
But both Mary and Suzie, while starting as ambiguous, potentially complex characters, end their episodes as plain evil, leaving Jack with no qualms about executing them. And Jack really has become a murderous bastard; I'm not sure what to make of that just yet. Continuing to shoot at Suzie from point-blank range when he knew it wouldn't actually help Gwen just seems sick and horribly cruel.
Then there are odd plot inconsistencies: first Mary refuses to let Toshiko bring her in to Torchwood, then she demands it. Suzie constructs an elaborate system to bring herself back from the dead that relies largely on coincidence and luck, and her motivation to do so only makes sense if she already knew what her death was going to be like, which she didn't otherwise why kill herself in the first place?
I feel like the writers need to dial back the angst just a tad and concentrate a bit harder on the world-building and character interaction. It's clear RTD wants to emulate Joss Whedon's style to an extent and I've been trying to compare Torchwood with Buffy et al to figure out what I liked about the latter that I'm not getting from the former. What I think Torchwood lacks that Buffy did so well are the small, sometimes banal, throw-away moments that reinforced the characters' personalities. I feel we keep getting told rather than shown things about the main characters. For all that RTD talked up this series as being about people, I don't think he's really delivered that.
Still, I continue to watch.
This was another episode that started quite strongly but slackened towards the end, and I can't make up my mind whether having the threat revealed to be completely human - and pretty lo-tech - was a great twist or something of a misstep for a series which touts itself firmly as science fiction.
For the most part Torchwood has been horror with sci-fi trappings, but we're squarely in slasher movie territory with "Countrycide". Meat hooks, wilderness, weird locals, filthy cellars, flyblown corpses missing their skin. The cannibal couple (a bit like a non-comedy version of Tubbs and Edward from The League of Gentlemen - perhaps they should have got Mark Gatiss in to write this episode?) were disappointing. I hate it when the villain turns out to be a cackling psychopath, reveling in their own evilness. It's a cliché and it's boring. The end of The Wicker Man, for instance, works much better for me because the villagers believe they are being completely reasonable.
Question: Would you let a cannibal whisper in your ear?
The creepiest parts of the episode were the elements that merely teased you about potential horror. The deserted houses, the piles of discarded shoes and the half-glimpse of something unidentifiable moving through the trees.
What I did like about the episode was the team scenes towards the beginning. Banter and burgers (and given what the villagers stock their freezers with, maybe Toshiko was wise not to eat anything). Continuity! Character stuff! The team are still awkward around Ianto because of Lisa, Toshiko fancies Owen unrequitedly and is jealous of Gwen, Jack remains evasive about his past. The scene where Gwen and Owen push each other up against trees came close to being something wholly nasty, but I liked the later scene where he tends to her buckshot wound.
Having missed the 10pm broadcast because I was doing a quiz at my mum's school*, I stayed up for the horribly late repeat (even though I'm not going to argue that Torchwood is bestest thing ever, I still find myself needing to see each episode as soon as I possibly can). I enjoyed this one more than last week's "Cyberwoman", but then I do have a thing for stories which play with traditional mythology.
- Death by rose petals.
- Backstory and grief and loss for Jack.
- Estelle, and her interactions with Jack.
- The camera swooping gracefully round Jack and Gwen as they walk down the street.
- Victorian trick photography (did Torchwood ever investigate this at the time?).
Stuff I didn't like so much:
- Full on CGI monsters just don't work yet; they'd have done better to have kept the fairies as shadows and bright lights and fluttering wings.
- This is more a pet peeve, but I hate scenes where a crying, angry woman ineffectually pummels on a man's chest and he hugs her tightly until she gives up and just sobs into his lapels.
--
* Which, unbelievably, my team won, for the second year running, so it was quite a good night last night.
Maybe Planet Earth was a hard act to follow this Sunday (an episode that featured both the ridiculously cute Emperor penguin chicks and the most terrifying closing shot I'd ever seen in a nature documentary - that of a fully grown polar bear peering in at the cameramen through the window of their tiny isolated hut, separated from them by a single pain of glass), but I didn't enjoy "Cyberwoman" as much as I thought I was going to.
It started off promisingly: seeing the team from Ianto's point of view made an interesting change, and the whole sequence with Dr Tanizaki was sad and unsettling. But somehow, the later events just didn't seem to move me, and I kept getting distracted by frustration at the way Gwen was written. For instance, of all the members of Torchwood, Gwen has the least reason to be worried for Jack as he gets electrocuted, and yet she is the one standing goggle-eyed in horror, while Owen drags her away.
For one glorious moment towards the end, I thought the anonymous and clearly doomed pizza girl had succeeded where Torchwood had failed and found a way to destroy Lisa. But no. Although, pizza-girl-with-Lisa's-brain was nicely creepy.
Still, this episode has done nothing to dispel my general feeling that while Torchwood is full of good ideas, it doesn't always manage to quite pull them off.
Brief thoughts (vague spoilers for this ep so beware):
-- Burn Gorman was excellent in this one, and I'm really happy that we got some thematic follow-on from Owen's behaviour in the first episode.
-- Frankly, not enough Ianto. Though episode 4 looks set to put that straight.
-- Still haven't seen much of Toshiko either. I do like the fact that she's been quite supportive of Gwen in small, crucial ways - standing up for her to Owen last week and in this one her exclaimation of "Go Gwen!" as she races to catch the boy in the hoodie. I hope we get more interaction between these two.
-- The Jack/Gwen stuff is interesting. I'm not entirely buying that we'll see a romantic relationship develop; it seems a little obvious.
-- On a similar note, people have been predicting Gwen's boyfriend Rhys is either going to end up dumped or dead, and again I'm not entirely buying it. We see tensions between them during the episodes, but we also see them resolved. I think we're going to see their relationship come under very great strain, and I think the writers are going to wring as much drama out of it as possible, which means having Rhys stick around for a while.
-- The Torchwood team are always eating. For some reason I love this.
-- Again, it's very much in evidence that the writers want to explore the way the alien artefacts affect people's lives, especially their emotional states; these aren't epic saving-the-world storylines but small, personal ones.
-- This is the second week in a row Gwen has inadvertantly caused someone's death.
-- Wasn't too keen on Jack's speech to Gwen in the final scene, seemed a bit pat and unnecessary.
